Design, development and implementation of the Natural Environment Decision System for Redland City

Project for Redland City Council. June 2011 - present.

The Natural Environment Decision Support (NEDS) system is a spatial model designed and developed to provide an expression of conservation value within the Redlands local government area to aid planning and development decisions. The initial phase of the project (undertaken in collaboration with Aecom) involved an assessment of literature and government initiatives; the design, development and creation of the NEDS system; a review and initial ground-truthing; and implementation of training, maintenance and support strategies for NEDS.

Phase 2 of the project carried out by BAAM incorporates alternative and supplementary data into NEDS to provide a greater level of detail for the mapped conservation values - contributing more accurate (property level) data to inform environmental decision making.

In particular, the State-based datasets used for Phase 1 were insufficiently accurate and/or created at an inappropriate scale for the desired end use. The creation of localised data layers managed at the local level was required to resolve this issue and fill knowledge gaps. BAAM has undertaken extensive habitat modelling and supplementary ground-truthing to significantly improve the accuracy of this advanced environmental decision-making tool.